


amidst the iowa sawgrass

by Princess_Sarcastia



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: Into Darkness - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Farmer Jim Kirk, Gen, Isolation, Self-Esteem Issues, Time Travel, Work In Progress, committ suicide immediately after he essentially renounces his captainship to spock, destruction of vulcan fix-it, five timelines splintering off one fixed point, in a series of worlds where he's not allowed to you know, note that tag because most of this is as of yet unwritten, sorry - Freeform, spoiler: it's not always a one-man mission; nor should it be, this is about unravelling the implications of star trek: into darkness for jim's sense of self, this is going to get bananas real quickly, vague musings about iowa, wild
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:01:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24935704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princess_Sarcastia/pseuds/Princess_Sarcastia
Summary: Admiral Marcus destroys the USS Enterprise.  And somehow, some way, Jim Kirk finds himself alive, five years in the past; three years before the destruction of Vulcan.  He's determined to make sure none of his future comes to pass, including Nero's genocide against the Vulcan people, but that's only the beginning.Or:Five ways Jim Kirk's one-man mission to save Vulcan could end for him.  Emotional and physical health may vary.
Relationships: James T. Kirk & Spock Prime
Comments: 24
Kudos: 83





	1. zero: endless Iowa sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [booksandreadingismylife](https://archiveofourown.org/users/booksandreadingismylife/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This whole thing is based on my back and forth with starlightandsunshine on tumblr, the latest iteration of which can be found here: https://starlightandsunshine.tumblr.com/post/622087072847626240/cry-with-me-about-aosjims-self-esteem-issues-in
> 
> Star Trek: Into Darkness was a mixed bag, tbh, but it was so emotionally fraught for Jim, and I find that incredibly fun to explore. So much so that I'm doing it five times over. 
> 
> If you'd like to know what the five different timelines are, check out the post (they're laid out in detail there) or ask me in the comments. Some of them will be more involved than others.

He doesn’t have time to feel hollowed out; he doesn’t have time for _anything_. His chest is tight and burning with it, full of guilt and _horror_ because—

“If it’s any consolation, I was never gonna spare your crew,” Admiral Marcus drawls; not a comfort, just one last knife to twist and fully lay what’s about to happen—oh god, his _crew_ —at his feet. The admiral turns to someone off-screen. “Fire when—”

And the feed cuts out.

No room to be hollow, no time to empty himself of the throbbing dread lodged in his chest like a second heart. God, he can’t _breathe_ , his _crew_!

Jim turns, slowly, because if he moves any faster, he’ll shatter and there isn’t time for that.

“I’m sorry,” he says distantly, like that means anything, like a fucking _apology_ will make up for leading hundreds of people to their deaths. 

Uhura has her hands over her mouth, frozen, for two seconds before she turns and sprints back to her station and throws every channel they have wide open, calling for someone, anyone, please.

Chekov's replacement sits and stares past Jim, toward the viewfinder to the sight of Marcus’ ship.

Sulu looks back at Jim and nods once, still determined to have his back. God, Sulu, Jim is so fucking lucky to have him; Sulu’s stood by him through all of this bullshit and in return Jim’s killed him. _Fuck_. His chest tightens even further, and he can’t breathe but it doesn’t matter, he doesn’t need to breathe, there’s no _time_ for breathing—

Spock stands at the back of the bridge, eyes wide and lost; heartbreakingly, humanly expressive. He’s _shocked_. Shocked like he—like he believed in Jim. Like he believed Jim was better than this and can’t fathom this failure.

And that just makes it worse, because Jim _can_ fathom it.

In the darkest and worst parts of his head—which make up a larger portion than anyone other than Bones has ever guessed—this is exactly where Jim always knew he’d end up: getting everyone he loved, everyone who put their faith in him wholeheartedly and unreservedly, killed, their blood thick on his hands.

Jim Kirk has always known himself to poison.

He has just enough time, not enough time, there’s no _time_ , to think of Bones, sitting in the Medbay, finally understanding that every second of love and hope he poured into Jim wasn’t worth it.

And then—fire. 

Fire and pain.

* * *

Afterimages of piercing light burst behind his eyes as he stumbles, gravel crunching under his boots.

…boots.

Jim flings a wild hand out, grabbing desperately at what feels like a synth-leather bike seat, and looks down at his feet.

He’s wearing boots.

Boots, and dark jeans, and a worn Henley he threw out two years ago when it finally bit the dust, and a leather jacket still hanging in his closet on deck six except not because Marcus destroyed deck six and the explosion rocked them all the way up to the bridge and the massive hull breach started a cascading failure in the life support functions and—

Jim gasps roughly and clutches harder at the synth-leather, dropping to one knee and his remaining hand. But as he hyperventilates his leather jacket is still, impossibly hanging from his shoulders.

He glances to the right and sees his old hoverbike, the one he abandoned in the shipyards. He looks up, and sees a dimming, endless Iowa sky, instantly recognizable as the one sight that will always feel terrifyingly like home.

And right there in front of him is that damn bar, the one the line of his life rests on like it’s a fulcrum.

His vision dims a little as harsh breaths keep tearing in and out of him, getting even shorter. He automatically tracks two people walking up the other side of the entrance, but it’s fine; they’re locals. Everyone in Riverside always knew better than to get involved in old Jimmy Kirk’s crazy, and this time is no different. They ignore him wheezing on the ground and make their way inside.

How is he here? Because there’s no denying that he is.

Even as his body shakes and burns with shock, trauma and that familiar heavy blanket of guilt, he can tell this is real. Or at least, it’s not a holo-simulation, there’s none of the markers for that. And the very fact that his body is responding to his mind like this means it’s not any other kind of simulation. 

Either he’s dead and gone to hell, or he’s hallucinating, or he’s time traveled. He fumbles for the comm in his pocket and flips it open to check the stardate.

The feeling of the heartland settles into his bones in a way he can’t bring himself to mistrust. Jim knows this place, this feeling. This is real.

He’s wearing a five-year-old outfit, next to a five-years-abandoned bike. Outside a bar where everything changed for him; though clearly, he didn’t change with it, because he’s still the same selfish nothing he was at twelve, getting everyone who even thinks about trusting him dead.

But for now, in his mind, he watches Uhura tip her head back and laugh at him while he grins; sees Pike settle into the seat across from him while he cleans an egregious amount of blood off his face. Slowly, his breaths grow longer.

His chest doesn’t feel any better, but his vision fades back in with the oxygen. He pulls his other leg out from under him and collapses back against his bike, just for a second.

Resisting the urge to curl up—because that’s comfort, he doesn’t need comfort, doesn’t deserve it, he got them all _killed_ —Jim lolls his head to the side and takes in the sight of it. Somewhere in the dumb, soft and naïve part of him, he’s always held this place sacred, even though he’s never been back.

This is where he heard Uhura laugh for the first (but not the last, oh god) time. Where he met Pike and decided to do _more_ with his life than just wallow in everything that came before. 

What a piss-poor decision that was. He should have known better. Jim was never going to live up to his father, or to Ambassador Spock’s perfect, shining image of Jim Kirk, Captain of the USS Enterprise that bled through their mind meld. _Never did figure out if that was deliberate on the old man’s part_ , Jim thinks, coherent at last, because he knows what he has to do, and it fills him with a familiar dead-eyed sensation.

Sitting once again outside the precipice of everything he never let himself say he wanted; at the biggest crossroads of his life, his own personal turn left.

_I was never gonna spare your crew_.

_I’m sorry_.

_I got them killed_ , he thinks mutely. _I got them all killed, Bones and Uhura and Spock and Sulu and Chekov and_ —

His ears are still ringing with it.

Fear and despair crackle in his chest, breaking the tight sensation just enough for it to double down and squeeze him that much further. 

He imagines Bones’ steady, warm hands. The quirk of Spock’s brow. Uhura’s laugh, again. Sulu’s steady presence. Chekov’s rapid-fire Russian whenever he got excited. Scotty’s deep and abiding obsession with their fair lady, another one of Jim’s casualties.

_I need to leave now_ , Jim thinks, nearly choking on it. _While they’re still alive_. 

Now he imagines that, instead. Uhura will get a round of drinks for her friends uninterrupted. Pike will never step foot in this bar, without Jim’s violent mess to drag him there. Bones—no, not Bones, _Leonard_ will spend the entire shuttle ride to San Francisco stiff and wide-eyed; but he’ll remember those breathing exercises to stave off panic attacks and make it there in one piece.

None of them will ever know what they’re missing, not that Jim is something to miss. He pushes unsteadily to his feet and slings astride the bike. Jim was never that important to their lives, not really. They can live on without him pestering and clinging and needing.

They can _live_ , without him.

He packs away the soft, dumb part of him making his eyes burn at the thought of giving up love and a family and a future. Shoves it into a box in the corner of his mind and seals it shut, because it’s better this way.

He’s always suspected he was poison, but now he knows for sure ( _I was never gonna spare your crew_ ) and he’s never going to let it touch them, not this time.

_I’m sorry_.

Jim lets that dead-eyed sensation he hasn’t felt since he left Tarsus fill him up, chasing away a burning desire to cry, kicks off on his bike, and doesn’t look back.

* * *

Dawn is creeping up over the horizon as Jim shoots down nameless empty back roads, and it’s only then that he remembers.

Vulcan.

_Fuck_.

He brakes hard in the middle of the dirt and releases his white knuckled grip on the handlebars to run rough hands through his hair. 

Holy fucking shit, what is he gonna do? Jesus, he can’t even— _no one would believe me_ , not now, Pike was always his last chance for credibility after all the shit he’s pulled. He won’t have access to any Starfleet resources or personnel. Won’t have Bones keeping him alive and Uhura’s skill driving them forward and Sulu having his back and Spock guiding him and Scotty pulling off miracles—

But he can’t just let this happen, what is he going to do? Sitting back while another genocide falls down around his ears is unacceptable, he refuses, he _rejects_ that.

It’s just that he’s got _nothing_ , no resources, no crew (it’s better this way) ( _I was never gonna spare your crew_ ), no ship. Some foreknowledge, sure, but…

Wait. 

Scotty. Miracles. Foreknowledge. 

_The trans-warp beaming equation, no one’s even dreamt of that yet_ , Jim thinks, yanking on his hair. That could be useful, an ace up his sleeve. And he knows Nero is coming. Knows exactly where he’ll be three years from now. 

He breathes out sharply. _Okay_. One hoverbike, the clothes on his back, a revolutionary travel equation from the future, a little bit of foreknowledge, and the bone-deep certainty that he _will not allow it_ ; that’s enough to save an entire planet from destruction, right? 

Right.

It’ll have to be, because ( _I was never gonna spare your crew_ ) Jim doesn’t have anything else. Can’t, have anything else.

Well then. First stop, Klingon prison planet.


	2. one: an infinite stretch of space

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starlightandsunshine asked the important question: What happens when Spock Prime comes along, in this universe where Jim hasn't joined starfleet? Well, Spock Prime will always find Jim Kirk, that's a given. 
> 
> Except, actually...sometimes, Jim finds him. 
> 
> But not before making everything a lot harder for himself.

Somehow, even in a vastly different timeline where Jim has never even laid eyes on Spock, he still ends up marooned on an icy wasteland of a planetoid. Granted, it’s Rura Penthe, not Delta Vega, but it still fucking sucks. 

If he hadn’t meant for this exact thing to happen, he might consider holding a grudge against the crew that stranded him here. God, what kind of people leave a man behind on a Klingon penal colony?

But Jim knew what he was getting into when he joined their operation. Had them all clocked the second he laid eyes on them. Only idiots—lucky, well-connected idiots, but idiots nonetheless—run smuggling rings in and out of Klingon space. Which is actually his exact brand of idiocy, these days, ask anyone! After all, once the “captain” heard who he was it didn’t take much convincing to get onboard. He’s got quite the reputation after three years of—of—

God, mixing frostbite and the nostalgia of once again trekking across a bunch of ice and snow was a bad idea. It’s making him maudlin, of all things, about choices he made willingly; choices for the benefit of literally everyone else in the fucking universe. He doesn’t get to be maudlin about preventing genocide.

Jim cups his hands around his mouth and huffs out another breath, trying to work any kind of feeling back into them. When it doesn’t work, he growls and pulls out his datapad anyway, poking at it clumsily. Thank god it’s a resistive screen and not a capacitive one, his fingers probably aren’t even conducting any electricity at this point. Only half a klick to go to reach the sensor lab base; given how far he’s gone already that’s nothing.

He grimly pushes through the aches in his legs and tries to feel positive about the fact that he can at least still feel them, unlike parts of his arms. 

Fucking ice planets. Icy Hoth-looking, death trap mother _fucker_ —

At least this one doesn’t have any native fauna.

* * *

The plan, for all that it sucks for Jim on a physical level and will probably end with him getting tortured by Klingons, is relatively simple.

What never made sense to Jim, when he thought back on everything that happened during the Battle of Vulcan, was why the Narada attacked a Klingon prison planet. Nero had the air of someone who spent years evilly obsessing over a single man, a single plan; he wanted to completely destroy Spock, and then Vulcan, and then the rest of the Federation of United Planets. So, what the hell was he doing in the Klingon Empire’s part of the Beta Quadrant, blowing up their penal colony?

Then he looked up where the Kelvin had been destroyed and an idea started to form. They were incredibly close to that fun part of the Neutral Zone where Federation, Romulan, and Klingon space kind of intersected. Where the borders were tense and nebulous.

Narada exits a black hole, over a hundred years in the past. Destroys the USS Kelvin in a neat crime of opportunity but gets severely damaged in the process. They’re traumatized, out for revenge, and now incredibly desperate. And they’re closer to Klingon space than anything else.

Jim managed to break through some of the Klingon Empire’s data security to retrieve classified reports on the incident, but not all of it, so the files he had were still partially redacted. But basically, Nero made an illegal pit-stop on a Klingon-controlled planet to scavenge (read: steal) parts to fix the Narada so they could go back to haunting the area where Spock would inevitably emerge for however long that would take.

And, being traumatized and desperate, they got caught. 

Unluckily for them, but conveniently for the Klingons, they were close enough to Rura Penthe that the Empire just kind of shrugged and dumped them there. 

Klingon engineers have been slowly piecing together the ship for the last ten years in orbit above Rura Penthe. They don’t have the tech to really access the Narada’s systems, even after torturing more than a few of the crew to death for access codes and information. But they’re getting close.

Jim figures the crew of the Narada has been slowly planning their escape this whole time, and eventually made it out right about now, three days before Ambassador Spock’s memories tell Jim he came out of the black hole. 

But that’s never going to happen now, after Jim has spent the week leading up to this little jaunt through deadly sub-zero temperatures infiltrating the security around the Narada, breaking into its systems, and setting it to self-destruct in the next six hours.

(All those jerry-rigged Romulan tutorials the past two and a half years, since he realized he might actually need to know some Romulan to infiltrate a Romulan ship, finally paid off. He has no idea how Uhura managed to get fluent in all three dialects in four years, he really doesn’t. It took him three years to become barely conversant in like, one and a half of them. He can’t count the number of times he half-typed in her comm number, desperate for any kind of help coding the tutorials or tracking subspace Romulan transmissions, only to hear Marcus say _I was never gonna spare your crew_ , see Uhura with her hands clutching her mouth, and let his finger falter. _I’m sorry_.)

Right around that time Jim will trick the Klingons into executing what remains of the Narada’s crew, Nero included. 

_There is no Starfleet regulation that condemns a man to die without a trial,_ Spock argues in his head _._

See, the Klingons helpfully put all of the future Romulans in the same dilithium mining shaft on Rura Penthe. Which is pretty stupid, if Jim does say so himself, but for some reason the Klingons never consulted him on strategy.

Dilithium mining is usually relatively safe, as long as you take the standard labor safety precautions. Usually. _Un-less_ the dilithium deposit has naturally formed into perfectly aligned lattices.

_Regulations aside, this action is morally wrong._

Then, you’re at risk of forming generator strata, which could, long story short, mess with the tectonic pressure of a planet’s crust to the point where it destroys itself in a spectacular fashion. It’s rare enough that Klingons here aren’t closely monitoring for it, but everyone heard about what happened in the Selcundi Drema sector; they have pretty ruthless safeguards should they detect any kind of piezoelectric effect.

Now, Jim can’t induce that effect artificially. Not only is it relatively impossible, but it would destroy this _entire_ planet, and everyone on it who didn’t get clear in time. He doesn’t want that.

It is, however, possible to alter the readout on the Klingons’ remote sensors of one particular deposit and the surrounding crust of Rura Penthe to make them think the mine was already in the later stages of forming a generator stratum.

That would trigger the overseers’ directive to protect the remaining dilithium deposits on the planet by completely destroying just that one with the future Romulans in it, remotely.

_Our mission could start a war with the Klingons, and it is, by its very definition, immoral._

_Dammit Spock,_ Jim thinks wearily _. Regulations aside, preventing the massacre of billions of innocent people and saving your mother is morally_ right _. And I’m not looking to win points for any of this._

 _How utilitarian of you_ , Bones grumbles in his mind, and Jim squeezes his eyes shut, hard.

Half a klick to go. 

* * *

Jim would feel bad about this, really, except he’s determined to be thorough. 

He ducks behind a corner as another squad of Klingon scientists and guards comes racing down the corridor. The whole base went into a tizzy once his program finished spoofing their sensors; the alarm still going off is literally deafening, Jim can’t even hear what they’re shouting at one another.

Hopefully it’s not, _find the saboteur and execute him at once_!

Two more lefts, then a right; then he should be in the hangar bay, according to the stolen base plans he memorized. Fingers crossed none of the leadership decided to flee yet, because he really needs to take advantage of all the panic and confusion to escape on one of their ships. His last ride is definitely not coming back for him, after he hung them out to dry in Klingon space.

It’s fine. He can absolutely jerry-rig a _Raptor_ class vessel fast and well enough to escape them. And his piece-meal, rusty Klingon can get him past the security checkpoints, and he can keep a 12-complement-crew ship going on his own long enough to access the transporter pad.

God, where’s Scotty when you need him?

 _I was never gonna spare your crew_.

Right. Safe, far, far away from Jim’s influence. Probably for the best, given Jim is definitely about to get caught and executed by the Klingon Empire; there’s no way in hell he’d put any of his crew through another suicide mission.

The hangar bay door opens when he steps up to it, and it’s miraculously empty as he zips inside. (There have been a lot of miracles, these past few days, but Jim was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth). Two _Raptor_ class ships are sitting there, with a few smaller scout ships further down the way. Tempting, given he’d probably be better equipped to man those, but he desperately needs a transporter pad they just don’t have.

All he has to do is get a ship safely to warp and he can beam out of it with Scotty’s equation, and go from there. 

Totally feasible.

He races to the hangar’s control booth, putting a token effort into avoiding the cameras but mostly just crossing his fingers and hoping that security is as distracted as he is by the alarms. 

Once he’s inside, he boots the OS up and digs the data chit he paid Jaelith an arm and a leg for out of his belt. It takes precious minutes to work its way into the system before connecting back to his personal pad and giving him remote control of the bay doors. It’s quick and dirty coding, the kind of thing Gaila taught him to turn his nose up at and not be caught dead with, but beggars can’t be choosers.

More running back out of the booth to closest _Raptor_. His heart is beating out of his chest, and he sees his hands won’t stop shaking. Sees, not feels, because he never actually recovered feeling from his extended time on the surface of Rura Penthe. But they can still move if he focuses and pays attention; he just can’t rely on touch to guide him. It’s fine.

A few (slow, too _fucking_ slow) taps on his pad has the access door sliding open and he rushes inside. Now it’s more than just his hands shaking; he never, _never_ expected to make it this far going into this, and every inch further feels like a miracle he doesn’t deserve.

( _why now, why only now, why only him and not three years ago when his crew needed it most?_ I’m sorry—)

Time elapsed occupies part of his mind, sending an extra kick of adrenaline his body did not need surging through him, but it’s fine, he can work around it.

He makes his way to the bridge at a half jog, half run, desperate to get there but also desperate not to miss a goddamn thing. He’s got two minutes, tops, before someone notices this ship is going through unscheduled pre-flight checks. Pre-flight checks he isn’t even sure he knows how to go through. All he has to go on is a half-remembered conversation with Sulu when they were both a little too drunk to be speculating on the makeup of Klingon vessels.

Once he makes it, there’s a sense of seeing reality through a funhouse mirror because everything is warped and a useless amount of familiar, like a bad case of déjà vu. He starts swearing under his breath and poking at things randomly until he finds the control panel for the pilot.

Okay. Close the access door. Pray the engines are all fine ( _purring like a kitten, Captain_ ). Find the ignition. Initiate liftoff procedures ( _Retract all moorings, Mr. Sulu_ ). Remember almost too late to open the fucking bay doors.

Be thankful steering apparatuses for smaller class vessels are apparently universal. Ignore the shouting from what is, apparently, comms station. Ignore the captain’s chair placed prominently in the center of the bridge. Ignore the phantom voices of people he’s never technically met. Find a compatible port on what had better be the navigation console for another data chit with warp calculations to some empty spot in space far, far away from here.

He sets the ship to autopilot once he figures out how to do that and races to what, by combination of process of elimination and guesswork, should be tactical, and activates an automatic defense protocol for when the Klingons start trying to shoot him down in about twenty seconds.

There’s no way he’s touching communications; his broken Klingon would give him away right off the bat and give them a recording of his voice, which could not possibly end well for him.

For a handful of breathless moments, he stands, trembling in pain and exhaustion and disbelief, in the center of the bridge of his stolen _Raptor_.

 _How is this possibly working_ , Jim thinks to himself. _How_?

And then the first shot hits the side of the ship, rocking him nearly to his knees. _Shit, did I raise shields?_ Jim thinks, panicking, and then sighs shakily when he remembers fixing tactical.

He runs his hands through his hair and stumble-walks back to navigation and piloting, clinging to the backs of the chairs.

Thirty seconds to warp.

The ship jerks with another shot and then turns in a textbook evasive maneuver the ship’s tactical computer generates in response. He winces. 

Twenty seconds to warp.

Everything shakes as the ship breaks atmosphere, and piloting starts pinging with contacts from the _Bird of Prey_ -class ships blockading this planet. One of them turns to begin firing and his _Raptor_ automatically corrects in another textbook tactical maneuver.

Ten seconds to warp.

Another ship starts firing on him.

Eight seconds.

He blindly approves final checks on navigation when they pop up.

Five seconds.

 _Impossible_ , he thinks to himself, gaze catching momentarily on the remains of the Narada just visible through the viewfinder. _How_.

Two seconds.

 _Punch it_ , Pike’s voice rings out, and Jim flinches just in time for space to stretch like a rubber band and then **snap** the ship forward. 

He’s at warp.

* * *

His memory of the two days he spends on the ship at warp is—is—there isn’t much; just vague flashes of what might be actual memories or might be contrived falsehoods he’s making up to feel better about losing time again. 

Things like checking pressure gauges and energy readings in engineering, disabling what…might have been some form of tracking beacon, he’s not exactly sure. Fragments of equations for navigation adjustments he _must_ have performed with new mapping data from the memory of the ship itself; the Federation doesn’t know all the specifics about deep Klingon space, so some of his original stuff was guesswork. 

The next memory he’s absolutely sure is real is hearing the final alarm for Ambassador Spock’s arrival and stumbling through the ship to the transporter pad, clinging to walls all the way through.

Apparently, he found emergency food stores at some point and automatically filled a pack with rations and slung it over his shoulders; he can feel it bumping against his back as he moves. No surprise he defaulted to finding food with his brain like this, because he hasn’t lost time since—

Now he’s in the transporter room. He’s got no idea how far it is from where he was, or even where he was before. 

It takes him a few tries to plug in Scotty’s trans-warp beaming equation; his hands still aren’t working great; _Bones is going to have a field day when he sees_ —

Ambassador Spock’s eidetic memory of his arrival somehow works across minds, and it feels strange in Jim’s head, like it’s the wrong software for his hardware. His broken, fucked up hardware. Anyway, he knows the exact coordinates where the Vulcan will be in two minutes, and the access frequencies to make it inside his ship.

Deep breath in; hold; release. Need to be able to stand, need to be able to explain. Jim squeezes his eyes shut and forces his mind into basic coherency, dredging up some last bit of focus he has in him.

One last thing, and then he’s—he’s—then it’s over. Then Vulcan is safe.

Then he can…

* * *

Spock hears something impossible. His head whips around as he hears the sound of someone beaming onto his ship and he starts in shock at the sight waiting for him. For a split second, half a moment, he thinks _mirror universe, it has to be,_ because this man made of sharp and jagged edges with brittle blue eyes couldn’t possibly be Jim Kirk.

His hair is unkept, and the deathly pallor of his skin only highlights his bloodshot eyes. He staggers, and surprises Spock for the second time in a minute by remaining standing in the end. Spock begin to calculate how he will subdue the intruder, and what could possibly be happening now that he has survived entering a black hole.

But then the man _smiles,_ impossibly wide, like he hasn’t smiled in years, like his heart is breaking, and says, “Hey, Spock,” and flashes a ta’al. “It’s been a while.”

And Spock takes him in for a long moment, comparing his demeanor to that of a man long dead, before he relaxes, sighs, and shakes his head in amazement. “James T. Kirk. How did you find me?”

“It’s a...” his voice breaks and he clears his throat. “It’s a long story.” He wipes at his face and winces; literally everything hurts. “But first, we gotta destroy the Red Matter. Nero, he’s—was—planning to use it to destroy Vulcan.”

Spock tilts his head to the side, thinking out loud, falling into old patterns effortlessly. “The Narada is a mining vessel; I theorize it would be possible for him to drill to the center of the planet and release the Red Matter, creating a singularity capable of consuming Vulcan.”

Jim sucks in a breath, still drinking in the sight of Ambassador Spock in front of him even though it _hurts_ to look at him. Because—because Ambassador Spock is expecting him to be _his_ perfect shining Jim Kirk, to be _good_ , the way no one else ever has his entire life, and certainly not at any point during the past three years. Ambassador Spock doesn’t know everything Jim’s done these last few years—does not, in fact, know him at all—but is trusting him immediately regardless, jumping right in with no preamble, or—or explanation. And Jim nearly shatters to pieces in front of him because Ambassador Spock is still _Spock_ , like Jim’s Spock (except no, not Jim’s, never Jim’s, never again, _I was never gonna spare your crew—_ ).

Never in his wildest dreams did Jim think he’d get the chance to see that thoughtful look on _any_ Spock’s face again.

Jim makes a croaking sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a sob, eyes welling. “Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it. We’re on the edge of Klingon and Romulan space, here. I think I destroyed the Narada, and Nero, but we have to make sure, Spock. We—I can’t—” he cuts himself off and sucks in another deep breath. “I can’t watch Vulcan disappear, not again.”

Spock raises an eyebrow at him, and he winces. Two minutes in and he’s already slipping, already giving away the fact that he knows something, that he’s from sometime else, too. 

But Spock doesn’t comment on this development, just says, “Indeed. Then we must proceed to a point in neutral space where it would be safe to detonate all of the Red Matter.”

Jim staggers forward because he doesn’t know how to stand with the weight of Vulcan, of everything, almost off his shoulders, and half-collapses against the wall of the cockpit, automatically gravitating toward Spock. Gets as close as possible, before he inevitably has to leave him, too.

“Yes.”

Spock turns back around, punching in coordinates and making what looks like spatial-gravitational calculations on the fly. Jim lies to himself and thinks he’d almost forgotten how effortlessly smart Spock was, like he hadn’t dreamt about him, about _all_ of them, every night. Like he isn’t near-giddy at the chance to sit next to him one last time.

“And perhaps along the way, you can explain how you came to be here,” Spock says, in that familiar tone that makes it clear it’s not a suggestion. The one that always made Uhura smirk and Bones clap Jim on the shoulder.

Another reason he’ll have to leave: all this reminiscence just might kill him. As soon as the Red Matter is gone, and he can stand again...

Something like a real smile etches onto Jim’s face regardless of the bittersweet memories and implicit threat to make him talk. He lets his head fall back against the metal, slides haltingly to the floor, and closes his eyes, trusting Spock to get them where they need to go. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let the roadtrip of emotional catharsis commence.


End file.
